San Francisco's Golden Age of Advertising and the people who created it.

Color is important, Ask Alan

Color is impor­tant, Ask Alan Lefkort ! In the previous collec­tion, I wanted to show the 1963 Award of Excel­lence for Direct Mail that was awarded to Alan Lefkort. The pages from the ADASF annual of that year were only in black and white. You will see that this winning design was not clear enough to show the image that made it a success.

I reached Alan to see if he could share the actual letter­head and enve­lope, for me to show here. He told the story of being told by Bob Pritikin that the stationery could only be printed in one color, black. Alan had to fight for color ! The whole adver­tising world knew that the copy­writers used yellow legal tablets as they came up with a winning head­line, body copy and all copy needed to reach the public in print and all other media of adver­tising. As copy devel­oped, there were a lot of ideas that the copy­writer tossed to the waste­basket. This was the normal process until the best copy ideas were born.

Alan Lefkort was often “covering two bases”: art director and copy­writer. He brought the two valu­able talents to many San Fran­cisco adver­tising agen­cies : McCann, Y&R, Dailey & Asso­ciates, D’Arcy-MacManus & Masius and Guild, Bascom & Bonfigli. Clever concepts of words and images came together in one place, on Alan’s drawing board. Visiting Alan, I saw a large collec­tion of printed pieces of a variety of corpo­ra­tions that adver­tised through San Francisco’s talented teams.

The Adver­tising Club of San Francisco’s Cable Car Awards,1981 publi­ca­tion was among Alan’s collec­tion. This 48-​page collec­tion was called “The Sweep­stakes Awards” because of the record amount of entries that year. Alan was the first ever to win the Marget Larsen Award for art direc­tion. He was, at that time, vice-​president and exec­u­tive art director for Dailey & Asso­ciates, San Fran­cisco.

Marget Larsen Award This was the art direc­tion award that Alan received for the image that he created for this “Black and White News­paper Ad” cate­gory even though his copy “Berth Announce­ment” was also a ‘winning’ copywriter’s line for the whole campaign for Philip­pine Airlines.